Chapter 39: The Crimson Deal with Darkness

(* A little twist, I write a lot of short stories, not on this blog here, and I haven't published them yet, maybe someday... and in the meantime I felt the need to share them here, even though they have no connection at all to the world of Tinderland content and most of them are fantasies from my fevered mind and my drafts drawer)

Bring me more of this light. And I'll bring you more of my life.

August in Tel Aviv felt like a blanket too heavy for me, someone trying to suffocate me with it. I walked along Dizengoff, but I didn't really see the cafes or the people. Everything around me was painted a deep gray. All I was looking for was to feel that burning in my chest again, something to remind me that I was alive.

I turned into a dark alley in the south of the city, where the neon lights stuttered as if they were about to die. There, in the shadows of an abandoned building, he waited for me. Dark. He looked like a frozen marble statue, wrapped in a cloak that swallowed up all the city’s light pollution. His eyes, two slits of molten gold, locked on the pulse in my neck.

"I'm offering you a deal," I said, baring my white skin in front of him. "I'll let you drink from me, and in return I want a memory. I want to see the sun through your eyes. I want to remember what it's like to love without your heart stopping."

Without saying a word, Darkeness leaned towards me. The moment his fangs met my skin, Tel Aviv simply vanished. I was sucked into the 18th century, into an old blacksmith shop. I felt young Darkeness's lungs. They were strong, full of warm air, expanding easily. I saw a girl laughing in the doorway with a blue ribbon in her hair, and I felt his heart skip a beat from pure excitement.

I looked at him, at this vampire, and for the first time I saw beyond the monster. I saw someone who held for me the treasure I had lost: the ability to yearn for something.

"Tomorrow," I promised him, my voice steadier now. "Bring me more of that light. And I'll bring you more of my life."

He looked at me, and something in the ice in his eyes cracked. "Tomorrow at the same time?" he asked. "Tomorrow," I replied. "There's still a lot of sunshine in you that I need to see."

The price of wanting to feel

The next day, echoes of his memory still coursed through my veins. The second night I returned to the alley. The smell of motor oil and salty sea mingled with Opel's signature "ozone" scent. He leaned against a wall of peeling graffiti, and under the full moonlight he looked eerily human.

"I thought you wouldn't come," he said. His voice was no longer just a murmur; there was curiosity in it, maybe even concern. "Your blood from yesterday left me with a taste of plowed fields. It overwhelmed me."

"I had to," I answered him. "Your memories make me forget the pain, and I don't know if I'm ready to give it up yet."

This time, the touch took me into a storm at sea. Darkeness was a young sailor struggling with ropes in freezing cold. I felt his raw fear of death. But then a moment of pure hope flashed within him as he saw a lighthouse on the horizon. The touch was abruptly cut off. Darkeness backed away, his face contorted.

"My memories are contaminated by yours," he breathed. "I inject you with light, and you inject me with your grief."

He looked at me for a long time, then reached out. For the first time, he didn't take blood, he simply held my hand. A warm hand inside a cold hand, in the middle of alienated Tel Aviv.

"What will happen when I run out of good memories?" he whispered.

“Then we’ll start making new memories,” I replied. Our connection had become more than a transaction; it had become a dialysis of souls.

The mirror inside the blood

By the third night, the exchange was already two-way. Darkeness wanted to know what it was like when someone loved without fear. I offered him my neck, and a double dive began.

He found himself on the Tel Aviv beach a few decades ago. He experienced me as a girl, running on the sand, while a beloved embraced me under an orange sunset. It was a sweet, innocent light that Darkeness had never known. At that time, I was sucked into a frozen dungeon in old Europe. I felt the moment he became a monster. The despair, the utter loneliness. When we hung up, I cried his tears. "You were so lonely," I whispered. "And your love..." His voice broke. That night we walked out of the alley onto the boardwalk, a warm hand in a cold hand.

We walked on the sand. "Your world is too fast," he said against the neon lights.

"Speed is our medicine for silence," I replied. We sat on a bench in front of the waves. He admitted that it was the most beautiful moment he had ever experienced. Not because of the view, but because someone saw him as a human being and not a monster.

This peace was interrupted when three bandits emerged from the shadows. Darkeness stood up with superhuman movement, quick as a shadow. He grabbed the attacker's hand until we heard the sound of bone cracking. His eyes burned gold and his fangs were bared. The bandits fled in a frenzy. Opal trembled with hunger, from the darkness that had come over him. I went up to him and placed his hand on my heart.

"Don't let their darkness destroy what we built," I told him quietly.

The Scarlet Pimpernel

Before the sun rose, Darkeness understood the price: I was turning into a pale shadow while he was becoming human. "It's over," he said as we returned to the alley. "I won't let you die so I can feel the warmth of the sun."

"If we unravel this, will I forget you?" I asked tearfully.

"You will remember that someone was here, but the taste and smell will disappear. You will go back to being a Tel Aviv goat."

He placed his hands on my temples. I felt a powerful suction. The memories of the blacksmith shop and the ship were pulled out of me, and in return, a physical vitality washed through my body. When I opened my eyes, the sun had already colored the buildings orange.

The alley was empty.

I stood there alone. I vaguely remembered a man with golden eyes who had watched over me, but the details melted away like a dream that fades in the morning. Suddenly I felt a simple, human hunger for fresh bread. In my jeans pocket I found a blue hairband, worn, smelling of fire and rain. I smiled a small, sad smile, tied the band around my wrist, and walked into the light of a new day.

פרק 39: עסקת הארגמן עם אופל